Again with the 14-year-old girls

So a bunch of the regulars on Reddit’s Men’s Rights subreddit have their collective knickers in a twist about dudes getting called “pedophiles” just for saying they think 14-year old girls are hot. Because that’s “ephebephilia,” dontchaknow, not pedophilia! And besides, thingsarebad argues

Normal heterosexual males will generally have sexual attraction for pubescent females of child-bearing age, from puberty till they start to get old and gross (late 20s, early 30s usually haha).

Share this:

Like this:

LikeLoading...

Related

About David Futrelle

I run the blog We Hunted the Mammoth, which tracks (and mocks) online misogyny.
My writing has appeared in a wide variety of places, including Salon, Time.com, the Washington Post, the New York Times Book Review and Money magazine.
I like cats.

TAB, I don’t give a damn what you or anyone else looks like. I care about the quality of their arguments. In the original post, you said that pubescent girls are attractive to “normal heterosexual men”, and the other posters chimed in saying it’s natural for adult men to have relationships with 13 and 14 year old girls, because they’re able to physically bear children. The argument is ridiculous. Girls start menstruation as young as 8 years old. Just because a girl is physically mature enough to carry a pregnancy to term does not mean she is emotionally and mentally ready for sex, especially with a much older man.

Men that pursue young girls like that are predators, or vice versa when the genders are flipped. Predators pursue young teens, because they tend to be naive and easy to manipulate. It’s good for governments to put predators in jail, so it can deter other adults from becoming predators.

TAB, the picture of you shows a self identifed wannabe child rapist. That, and that alone, makes it creepy. David has never posted screeds about how it is natural and right to want to rape children.
I can tell nothing from a picture. I can tell much more from your actual words.

Seriously, two threads? Two threads of Things Are Bad posting his picture and expecting everyone to… I don’t even know what. Tell you that you’re pretty? Reconsider our ideas about feminism and whole-sale rejection of thoroughly debunked, evo-psych bullshit because you’re squinting? And wearing what appear to be knock-off Ray Bans?

i personally agree that there should be a distinction between pedophilia and ephebophilia, and not because i am trying to bag some 14 year olds, but because i don’t think half of the population’s sexuality should be stigmatized. I have never had sex with someone below the age of consent, and I don’t plan on doing it, but I also don’t want society to think of me, and every other normal man, as EVIL, just for having the capacity to find teenagers good looking. Is that so crazy and hard to understand?

I think it’s safe to say that less than 200 years ago this was a pretty normal thing. In fact, in many parts of the world, if not most, it still is. That doesn’t make it right at all.

Used to be that fathers sold their daughters off for brood mares at puberty to escape the cost of a mouth to feed. They usually sold the girls to older (old) men. The norm of society was essentially what’s illegal today. WHY?

Because it was HARM!!!

It is perfectly biologically natural for an adult male to see a decently developed girl from afar and mistake her for an of-age woman, and to acknowledge consciously an attraction. It is an entirely different matter to entertain the ethical (moral) nature of this attraction beyond that point once the male is up close enough to recognize the true age of the girl in question.

I will not deny the natural attraction that all men have when mistaken. This is known as “good from far, far from good.”

I will say that this from-far attraction should end as the distance closes. At that point it is just as NATURAL to feel a quick sickness in the pit of the stomach and to feel shame for having so easily mistaked a younger female for an adult female.

Life is full of mistakes and “false peeps”. The trick of the SANE male is to recognize some abnormal -philia, and differentiate it from what these perverts claim proudly to be a normal sexual preference.

They are sick bastards to say it’s not stomach turning and shameful when such a mistake is made from afar by a normal adult male.

@jimmythegreeksghost Uhm no. It is by no means a normal biological reaction to feel sick in the stomach upon seeing young girls up close. That’s just you guilt tripping yourself.

Morals or ethics are not a biological construct, they are a societal construct. Our lizard brain does not care about emotional development or date of birth. It looks for visible sexual characteristics and upon finding them, will signal sexual attraction. That’s all there is to it.

Evolution wise, emotional development only came into the picture rather recently. For the past million or so years it did not matter. Animals don’t have to have “the talk” with their parents first before starting to copulate. They just do. Our sexual instincts still hail from that time.

Now obviously, having a big n bulky brain and everything, we can choose not to act on those attractions. And I’d certainly agree that we shouldn’t. It doesn’t quite deserve the hysteria people make about it, but it’s certainly problematic.

But that doesn’t mean you have to feel bad about having those attractions. They are indeed normal. And that’s not just me saying this; according to the American Psychiatric Association, Ephebophilia is neither registered as a mental disorder nor as a paraphila. And that describes the *preference* for teens, the mere presence of attraction doesn’t even warrant it’s own name. It’s not even considered to be odd.

Why do you frame your questions with an accusatory premise? It makes us men feel like we need to defend what comes natural, thus placing us in ‘the guilty seat’ even before we reveal our perspective. Is it a men’s rights issue to have natural (&110%average) feelings about ANY damn thing without being made fun of? You’re goddamned right it is- and think about it the next time you hear someone say the word ‘fag’. Calling us ‘creepy’ isn’t kind, and most guys know that girls throw that word at us as a sort of ‘shit test’ to see if we’re confident of ourselves. It makes you sound jealous of younger girls. Not sayin you are.. It just sounds that way. Maybe if people weren’t so judgmental society could come to socially accept what’s natural, and if you think it’s unnatural weird gross or sick, that just makes you sound like a conservative in San Fransisco circa 1965. Think about it.. (www.areallmenpedophiles.com) watch the trailer

It’s actually good to feel shame for reprehensible things you do. This message is brought to you by the 3rd grade.

But seriously, if you find yourself involuntarily attracted to a young teenager… bwergh? It’s hard to fault you for involuntary passing thoughts I guess? But the moment you stare at her, hit on her, talk about how it’s unfair that society isn’t cool with you sleeping with her, how women over the age of 25 are ugly useless hags who want to limit your access to teenagers so that they can hone in on your clearly very valuable giggly bits, talk about how that particular 14-year-old is really mature and just gets you, okay, plus women your own age have ceased to be impressed just because you can get dressed in the morning THOSE HYPERGAMOUS BITCHES, those are shameful things.

@David: “Natural” is not an argument. It’s natural for humans to want to urinate at inappropriate times, but most of us civilized people learn to, you know, hold it in until we are in the vicinity of a bathroom. You use the word “natural” as shorthand to mean “I should be able to do whatever I want to do, because I want to do it, and I shouldn’t have to think about the welfare, feelings, or even the basic humanity of mere broads who, after all, only exist on this Earth to fulfill my desires and for no other purpose.” That is really the gist of your argument, and the commonly heard trope that it’s “natural for men to take whatever they want and for women to be taken whenever they are wanted”. It’s disgusting, insulting and bigoted. To call you a creep is charitable.